Wednesday, September 26, 2012

THE SHADOW OF THE CAT (1961)

Cats and old houses are staple
ingredients of horror-films, and over the decades both have accrued many
complex symbolic associations.

There’s nothing complex about John
Gilling’s SHADOW OF THE CAT, however.An
old woman, owner of a ritzy country mansion and a cat named Tabitha, is
murdered by a cabal made up of her servants and relatives.The conspirators hide the old woman’s body in
the hope that she’ll be declared legally dead in time, allowing them to divvy
up her estate.But there’s one problem:
Tabitha witnessed the murder.

There’s absolutely no hint of the
supernatural here; not only is the old woman’s spirit not in the cat, there
aren’t even any significant parallels between feline and owner.The cat isn’t even spooky-looking in any way,
nor does it ever seem possessed of more than feline intelligence.Nevertheless this common-looking housecat
holds a grudge and manages to bedevil the murderers—all of whom conveniently
remain in residence at the mansion—into falling down stairs, venturing into
deadly marshes, and so on.The only
diversion from this main plotline is a subplot about the old woman’s missing
will, which if found will confer great favor with the woman’s only “good relative,”
played by Barbara Shelley, who doesn’t do anything but cluck her tongue at her
relations for persecuting a poor little cat.

The best facet of this standard
“punish-the-evildoers” tale—which I enjoyed on that level, even without much in
the way of symbolic flourishes—is that Gilling keeps everything looking rather
ordinary.Not only is Tabitha a
commonplace feline, but the mansion is, rather refreshingly, never treated as
an “old dark house.”Most of the scenes
take place in well-lit areas, so there’s no visual or musical cues to warn the
audience before the cat strikes.One
might fairly regard SHADOW OF THE CAT as a minor harbinger of the vogue for
“naturalistic horror” in the early 1970s, though Gilling didn’t pursue this
approach in his later and better-known horror-films of the 1960s, such as THE
REPTILE and PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES.